Posted on 08/14/2024 12:38:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Anyone who’s enjoyed a career as long as Clint Eastwood and been in as many great movies as he has during those seven decades in the limelight is inevitably going to notch a handful of masterpieces. Still, on either side of the camera, he’s never been better than The Outlaw Josey Wales.
The debate over which entry in Eastwood’s filmography can be called the greatest has raged for decades, which is understandable when he’s got Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, Dirty Harry, Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven, Escape from Alcatraz, High Plains Drifter, In the Line of Fire, Pale Rider, and many more under consideration.
However, a combination of how Eastwood weathered the storm of production to emerge on the other side with a classic, what the film meant to both his career as a whole and the entire western genre, and the way it subverted traditionalism in favour of something darker, dangerous, and ultimately more compelling elevates The Outlaw Josey Wales to the top of the pile.
The man himself revealed that it’s the one movie people stop him in the street to talk about more than any other, an impressive accolade in itself, looking at everything he’s achieved. It’s both a successor to the Dollars trilogy and the progenitor of Unforgiven in a way, and that duality makes it intrinsic to the man, the myth, and the legend of Eastwood in more ways than one. Of course, it helps that it’s a masterclass in atmosphere, technique, confidence, performance, and execution, too.
If it’s good enough for Morgan Freeman to name it as Eastwood’s best, then who’s to argue? It even led to a shift in the complexion of mainstream filmmaking to further enhance its legacy, with the leading man not even planning to direct until he instructed producer Robert Daley to fire Philip Kaufman, instigating a ruling – colloquially known as the ‘Eastwood Rule’ – from the Directors Guild of America that prohibits an actor or producer from giving a director their marching orders and stepping in to replace them.
That’s beside the point, but it made The Outlaw Josey Wales a monumental production nonetheless. Coming more than a decade after Dollars and a decade prior to Unforgiven, the movie finds Eastwood at a pivotal moment in his career and in the midst of his Dirty Harry run. He’d starred in traditional westerns and popularised the spaghettified version, but it was here where his penchant for hard-boiled revisionism came to the fore.
A revenge story in a figurative, literal, and existential sense, the sins of the title character’s past haunt him in the present and completely alter his future when vengeful union forces murder his wife and child. In his quest for retribution, Wales signs up with the Confederate Army, already differentiating the film from the pack by having the protagonist fight on the side everybody knows ended up losing.
He refuses to surrender in the aftermath of the Civil War, only to watch the same man who killed his family massacre his fellow soldiers. With a bounty on his head, what follows is a quest for redemption plagued by the unrelenting necessities of violence, making Wales much more than the standard one-note western protagonist who shoots the bad guys and lives happily ever after.
The scene where he grieves his family was the rawest display of emotion Eastwood had ever projected in any of his films, with Wales reduced to a tear-soaked wreck. Not out of the ordinary considering the circumstances, but that heart-on-the-sleeve mentality goes on to inform the rest of not just the narrative but the main character’s journey.
After losing his real family, he even ends up finding a surrogate clan, complicating what he envisioned to be a single-minded thirst for blood that couldn’t remain unquenched. While many would point to Unforgiven as being Eastwood’s version of John Ford and John Wayne’s The Searchers given what it means to him as an actor, filmmaker, and persona, The Outlaw Josey Wales fits that billing better.
Whereas his Academy Award-winning favourite was a swansong to the genre that made him who he is, when viewing his career as a whole The Outlaw Josey Wales is the definitive connective tissue. It was one part Man with No Name, one part Harry Callahan, and one part William Munny, all soaked in the baggage of its leading man as a performer and personality, marshalled with a director who knew they had to pull out all the stops to ensure their reputation wouldn’t be ruined by the coup that put him there in the first place.
That’s an incredible amount of pressure, especially when it sought to deconstruct the essence of the classic western and Eastwood’s place in its history, all while telling a resonant and complex story that didn’t skimp on the action or shootouts, either.
It was a hell of a balancing act, and it’s because he pulled it off so effortlessly and timelessly that The Outlaw Josey Wales is the best movie he’s ever been in on either side of the camera.
Yes, I remember he was the mayor who put Clint on triple secret probation
“I don’t wanna hear no more talk,
about going to Headquarters,
killing the Generals,
and raping the nurses.
Good things come to those who wait!”
LOL!
Eastwood meticulously had to script --verbally and with note cards- technical instructions in order to participate in his scenes - 90% of the movie.
Eastwood tells a funny story about a scene he directed behind the camera where he comes galloping up with a group towards the no-longer-abandoned ranch and forgot he was in the scene!
Is it his best movie? I don't know, maybe. Hackman and that supporting cast (minus "The Schofield Kid's" Woolvett and his weird out-of-place SoCal surfer accent dissolving into a strange Chris Penn imitation) took Unforgiven to another level.
Buzzards gotta eat, same as the worm.
Don’t piss down my leg and tell me that it is raining.
How is it on stains?
Gran Torino, of the best movies ever made
“Whenever I get to likin’ someone, they ain’t around long.” -Josey Wales
“I notice when you get to DISlikin’ someone they ain’t around for long neither.” -Lone Watie
Love the Eastwood/Leone flicks, but the soundtrack from "Once Upon a Time in the West" by Ennio Morricone defined the genre. Okay, and a special nod to James Horner for "The Magnificent Seven".
The G,B, and U I consider to be the best movie he was in but it was the cast and the director and crew that all shined to make this movie.
I enjoy Kelly’s Heroes for the story
High plains drifter for the acting and raw visuals. Hell town was awesome.
Outlaw Josey whales as second best.
And for just for the guilty fun, Paint your wagon. I did not get into his singing but the story was fun and the songs were great.
Gran Torino was a very good movie. He was excellent in it.
One of my favorites by Eastwood.
You may i say have no respect for crapgame if big Joe is the best character.
And they call the wind Mariah.
My fav song from the movie.
Agree. Unforgiven is a movie I’ll always stop and watch if I stumble across it while channel surfing.
Joe Kidd. Both Eastwood and Duval
I think that Lee Marvin was probably drunk nearly every day, period.
I think that Lee Marvin made a movie with Richard Burton, at the end of both of their careers, and, both of them were drunk for the entire shoot.
“ -Hypothetical situation, huh? All right, I'm standing on the street corner, and Mrs. Grey there comes up and propositions me. She says if I come home with her, for $5 she'll put on an exhibition with a Shetland pony...
-If this is your idea of humor, Inspector...
-All right, what are you trying to do here, Callahan?
- I'm just trying to find out if anybody in this room knows what the hell law is being broken, besides cruelty to animals.”
Dirty Harry for me.
I dunno, I liked the conversation where the young kid says "I guess he had it comin."
To which CE responds; "We all have it comin, kid."
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